Improvements Finally Made in How We Name Asteroids (wgsbn-iau.org) 47
RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes:
For a number of years the administrative process for giving asteroids names has had a worsening logjam. Important or "interesting" bodies (such as `Oumuamua, the first definitely interstellar object identified) would still get names rapidly assigned, but in the background myriads of unspectacular objects would persist with "names" based on their discovery date like "1981 GD1". Which is adequate for managing databases, but less than satisfactory for most humans.
A new publication from the "Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature", combines what used to be several steps into one stage. So now one can easily find that "1981 GD1" has the name "Rutherford", to commemorate one of the major scientists of the 20th century.
No doubt there will be complaints of an over-concentration on figures from Classical legend (22 of 179 names assigned), but eventually that mine will play out. Professional and amateur astronomers (34 and 30 names) are, unsurprisingly, the largest groups commemorated. Other scientists get a good showing (16, Rutherford included), along with memorials to teachers, observatories and universities. One architect and one astronaut (there isn't a bar on memorialising living persons) also get mentions, and modest numbers of sports stars, musicians and other cultural figures pad out the list. Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese contributors have a significant input to this batch, along with a number of South American contributions and a fair number from smaller countries (Paul Erdos, for example, in the {dead+ white+ mathematical eccentrics} category). And one entry which I can only class as a joke — 1990 QX19 gets a name which should have been used years ago. Obviously you'll need to RTFA to see the joke, but RTFA-ing is an un-Slashdot activity.
Future numbers of the Bulletin will publish new batches of assigned names, and work away on the backlog. You still need to be the discoverer of a "small body" to submit a name proposal, but that step of the process is also under review. With about 22,000 of the currently-recognised million-plus objects with well-characterised orbits, there is no realistic prospect of running out any time soon — they are being found faster than they get named. But eventually you too could name a pathetic little mudball for someone you despise. Won't that be fun?
A new publication from the "Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature", combines what used to be several steps into one stage. So now one can easily find that "1981 GD1" has the name "Rutherford", to commemorate one of the major scientists of the 20th century.
No doubt there will be complaints of an over-concentration on figures from Classical legend (22 of 179 names assigned), but eventually that mine will play out. Professional and amateur astronomers (34 and 30 names) are, unsurprisingly, the largest groups commemorated. Other scientists get a good showing (16, Rutherford included), along with memorials to teachers, observatories and universities. One architect and one astronaut (there isn't a bar on memorialising living persons) also get mentions, and modest numbers of sports stars, musicians and other cultural figures pad out the list. Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese contributors have a significant input to this batch, along with a number of South American contributions and a fair number from smaller countries (Paul Erdos, for example, in the {dead+ white+ mathematical eccentrics} category). And one entry which I can only class as a joke — 1990 QX19 gets a name which should have been used years ago. Obviously you'll need to RTFA to see the joke, but RTFA-ing is an un-Slashdot activity.
Future numbers of the Bulletin will publish new batches of assigned names, and work away on the backlog. You still need to be the discoverer of a "small body" to submit a name proposal, but that step of the process is also under review. With about 22,000 of the currently-recognised million-plus objects with well-characterised orbits, there is no realistic prospect of running out any time soon — they are being found faster than they get named. But eventually you too could name a pathetic little mudball for someone you despise. Won't that be fun?
Re:Let me guess - tokens everywhere (Score:4, Informative)
Like the VPOTUS choice and every NASA broadcast, this will of course be packed with women who qualify solely by vagina possession.
Stop sexism.
The VPOTUS is one of the most qualified to ever hold that position. She's a former attorney general for the the 5th largest GDP in the world and, subsequently, senator for same.
Sexists like yourself just come off as uneducated and bitter.
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Like the VPOTUS choice and every NASA broadcast, this will of course be packed with women who qualify solely by vagina possession.
Stop sexism.
The VPOTUS is one of the most qualified to ever hold that position. She's a former attorney general for the the 5th largest GDP in the world and, subsequently, senator for same.
Sexists like yourself just come off as uneducated and bitter.
And yet with all those qualities that she's demonstrated basically none of, she was literally chosen as VP for exactly two of them; her skin color, and her vagina. So far, any college graduate from Woke University could do the same job of smiling and making empty promises while being a world-class hypocrite.
That's not sexist. That's fact. There's a difference.
Oh, and when you call a laywer a qualification for VP, it tends to say a lot about how we view that position now. That used to be a position of tr
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"...former attorney general for the the 5th largest GDP..." :-P
"...and when you call a lawyer a qualification for VP..."
Whoa whoa WHOA. An Attorney General for ~40 million people and a 'lawyer' aren't really the same thing. Kinda like a functioning, contributing member to society, and a Slashdot commenter. HUGE difference.
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Only in your pathetically warped brain could wanting everyone to be treated equally, without regard to gender or race, be seen as despising people.
PICK THE BEST PERSON FOR THE JOB.
Anything else is DISGUSTING SEXISM AND RACISM.
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Nope, decent people oppose sexism and racism because it is WRONG, not because they have been a victim of it
And then, there are sad, whiny wankers like you.
Is this a good thing? (Score:2)
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Check the (regularly updated) list at https://minorplanetcenter.net/... [minorplanetcenter.net] and you'll find that "Fred" has already been used as a component of 40-several names, mostly "Alfred"+Family name, "Manfred"+Family name, that sort of thing. Ah!, "Fred" alone is covered by the "too short" criterion for names. Your proposal would have ben rejected, probably multiple times. Several generati
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And I, who isn't a Hawi`ian.
It's not difficult, you just have to step outside the (mental) box in which your ancestors imprisoned you, stretch your lips, and embrace the rest of the universe. Astronomy is good for the last step.
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Bullshit, language that is useless and purposeless to most humans. Not even 0.1% of the population of Hawaii speaks it, and then number drops by the day.
Really cold mudball (Score:2)
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(You do touch on a fair point though. The expectation has been shifting over the years an now nobody is surprised if an object that is on the books as an "asteroid" actually shows some "cometary" activity (diffuse image, possible ion and dust tails), particularly if imaged at local perihelion.
"Asteroids" and "comets" are no-longer viewed as distinct classes, but as members of a spectrum. That is reflected in the name of the naming
what about ebay? high bider picks the name? (Score:2)
what about ebay? high bider picks the name?
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You are looking for one of the "name a star for your pubic lice" sites, such as throw-your-money-away.com or one of it's more down-market competitors.
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It would be a terrible world where I could insult an idiot with the username "cfalcon", and the insults were unjustifiably associated with your userID "779563" because in your mental namespace
Don't read the article! (Score:4, Informative)
1990 QX19 gets a name which should have been used years ago. Obviously you'll need to RTFA to see the joke
It's not worth it.
(192291) Palindrome = 1990 QX19
Discovery: 1990-08-17 / A. Lowe / Palomar / 261
A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward, of which the permanent number of this minor planet is an example
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I thought the glory days of listicle spam (#7 will SHOCK YOU SENSELESS) left me permanently jaded to clickbait disappointment, but this one was barely worth scrolling down the comments for. I can only express my deepest condolences to you for having to actually ctrl-F through that thing to find it. Thanks for taking one for the team.
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BuRn ThE HERETIC!
(192291) Palindrome = 1990 QX19 (Score:2)
For those who don't want to bother RTFA: (192291) Palindrome = 1990 QX19
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The queue is not likely to be long.
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Two camps emerged from that debate over how to designate objects - a Frenchman who produced a list "M1", "M2", "M3" (etc, to "M101"), versus a German living in England who named a moving source of light as "Georgium Sidus" (in a language which was
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MPC has enlarged the packed format to include more digits in the repeat count. Meanwhile, the current packing uses alphanumeric characters to get to roughly "year and four or five letters and numbers" in your terms.
ZTF is already up to speed and has notched 7109 asteroids (230 NEOs) as of this morning. It is a wonderful survey for a wide range of science, but is not tuned for moving object discoveries and its 1.2-m aperture keeps its limiting magnitude (for NEOs) about 1.5 mags brighter than the dedicated N
Name one after each language that goes extinct (Score:2)
It's the least we could do
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One small potential hiccough is the naming criterion (link [minorplanetcenter.net]) that
The reasons for that ought to be obvious (this being Slashdot), but where you're talking about a dead language, surely that is more of an en
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No, languages die because they are useless and unneeded. Astronomy is not the place to keep track of nor memorialize dead languages. They don't matter to most, most don't give a shit nor should they.
the naming rules are unchanged (Score:4, Informative)
The International Astronomical Union has always been responsible for naming asteroids. What has changed is the mechanism for submitting nominations. There are limits on political and military figures, and the IAU working group can reject offensive or otherwise inappropriate names. Named asteroids can still be referenced by their numerical designations. Names can be in any language and presumably could be submitted in a non-ASCII character set.
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How long before someone submits one which is solely Unicode emoji?
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How long before someone submits one which is solely Unicode emoji?
I can imagine the bewilderment for future generations, as they crack the ancient Unicode, only to discover an ass-teroid named poop.
Ranks right up there with Ovaltine commercials.
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To repeat what I typed a few moments ago,
One small potential hiccough is the naming criterion (link [minorplanetcenter.net]) that
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In a more computing-related form, naming conventions and avoiding name clashes have been significant topics in the design of program
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That happens all the time. It's the Sun's fault.
You're looking for new members of a class of bodies. The nearest and brightest have already been discovered. So, you're looking for dim objects.
So, you need to look into the sky, at the Earth's shadow (i.e., opposite to the Sun). You also need to avoid looking at the Moon with your (technical term) "ligh
quick question (Score:2)
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Yeah, I thought about this a while back.
The naming criterion I mentioned up-thread (paraphrasing, "if you can write it in Tex, it's good.") failry clearly addresses that. I see plenty of Chinese script users (and other oriental ideographic writing systems) in use in the general Astronomical publications systems, and not many complaints about not being able to write names. Obscure mediæval central E
Stupid (Score:2)
This is pointless. The number of objects in the night sky vastly (VASTLY VASTLY) outnumbers the sum total of words in all human languages. It only makes sense that only the interesting or noteworthy get conventional names. For most a cryptic alpha-numeric code is perfectly fine and efficient.
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From the reports I've seen, to the people for whom something is named (e.g. regular school science teacher mentioned up-thread) getting an asteroid named for you is a huge personal deal. If you can't empathise with that then you're even more of a psychopath than I am. And I'm quite a way along that spectrum.
Waiting for Rama. (Score:2)